Washington, April 6 (TNS): A massive research effort that started more than a decade ago has completed a comprehensive PanCancer Atlas that, for the first time, offers researchers and clinicians alike a way to fully understand cancer according to its genomic and molecular features.
Researchers reveal the detail included within the PanCancer Atlas. The PanCancer Atlas is so vast that it spans more than two dozen scientific papers published in several Cell journals. It represents a huge milestone in the work of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).
This was sponsored by two institutes within the National Institutes of Health (NIH): the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Human Genome Research Institute. More than 150 researchers at more than two dozen research establishments across the United States have worked on the $300 million program. This project,” says Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the NIH, “is the culmination of more than a decade of groundbreaking work. You can access the newly published PanCancer Atlas papers through a portal that groups them into three categories: “cell-of-origin patterns, oncogenic processes, and signaling pathways.
Cancer is a disease that arises when cells start to grow out of control because of errors in their DNA. The traditional way of classifying cancer is according to where it starts in the body for example, breast cancer, prostate cancer, or stomach cancer. The work that culminated in the PanCancer Atlas was launched as the Pan-Cancer Initiative at a meeting in 2012 that took place in Santa Cruz, CA.
